Your PC Must Be This Burly To Play Watch Dogs

Watch Dogs is finally arriving next month, after what seems like 65 years (give or take) of hype, delays, doubts, and discussion. It will be on last-gen and next-gen consoles, but it will also be on PC. What kind of PC must you have to run it? Well.

Today the game went up for pre-order on Steam, with its minimum and recommended PC specs laid bare for all the world to see. Here goes:

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seeing such high spec demands gives me hope that this isnt going to be another shitty port which alot of games have been of recent, i have the hardware to play stuff and make it look pretty, just a lack of games with many technical graphical options

Oh it ran well and look good, however you can still see the compromises that had to be made for consoles... and that concerns me in regards to Watchdogs. However I believe they have said in the past, PC was their primary platform for this game!

Hmm not really, it just works differently. It really depends how the software is written to take advantage of this fact. All I was saying was that, after someone saying about the indication of 8 cores means its not simply a port from console game. I was simply pointing out that the new gen consoles actually run an 8 core processor.

Technically in AMD terms it's an 4 Module/8core processor, because each module has 2 cores, which share resources (so not a true 8 core setup). Not to mention the games can only use a maximum of 6...

They are also running very low powered AMD jaguar core with low IPC (instructions per cycle) at a lowish clock speed. A modern core i5 with only 4 cores would demolish the cpu used in both the xbone and ps4 easily.

eg...if you have a 4 core processor at say 2 ghz but it does 3 ipc, where the 8 core processor at say 2 ghz will do 1 ipc (because it's less efficient) even with a really highly multi-threaded application the 4 core processor will be way faster.

Since the xbone/ps4 both use x86/64 processors, and AMD gpus, it's very easy to compare the raw performance of the cpus and gpus to modern computer cpus and gpus.

...which use the jaguar architecture, designed for phones and ultrabooks. All 8 of them combined are about as powerful as a single core on that 3770. Both of the recommended CPUs are immensely more powerful than the console ones.

Hm thats a fair point, but i am guessing it has been written to use 8 cores if it can, Which is why they probably said optimal for that, As then it can use all 8 cores, much like it probably will on the xbone, that said one or 2 will allready be used by the OS on either PC or console. And am not saying you are wrong at all, but as well the OS on the consoles would be optimized for the hardware to run at maximum efficiency, however now that I have said that, it is Microsoft so who knows. hahaha

Thats why I just have a standard PC for all my pc gaming these days. Few games are actually customizable enough to actually make the investment into high end tech worthwhile.
Save money and spend it on a next gen console. Get the best of both worlds

To save yourself a bit of money I suggest the FX-8350, its an excellent overclocker, the 9370 is practically a overclocked 8350. The rest of the setup seems fine, same some $$$ get the 8350 and through in 16gb of ram.

I wonder if the game is actually optimised to actually use all those cores - or if they've simply put the recommended specs that high so people don't freak out because the game is not optimised for PC.

I'm hoping so, I have a AMD FX-8350, thinking in mind about the nextgen (current gen) consoles having 8 core cpu's.And the only game to date that takes advantage of the cpu is bf4. I'm hoping I made the right choice as I only put my build together nov last year.

Didn't even realise this was coming to pc, was planning on waiting for the Wii u version. Not anymore! Sorry Nintendo :(
Edit: Also by the time this is released I'll have my new top of the line alienware laptop, so I should have no trouble running this.
Ps it's great to know that the game is optimised for x64, I hope it will use at least 8gb of my 32gb of ram.

The i7-3770 is a 4 core processor, but it comes with hyper-threading enabled. This allows for 2 threads per physical core to perform different tasks, so it effectively appears as 8 logical cores in the task manager.

The AMD FX-8350 X8 on the other hand genuinely uses 8 physical cores.

So while it's technically true that the i7-3770 has 4 cores, I doubt it's a mistake.

And GPU is same-or-less than what consoles have. Therefore, I can only assume: PC visuals will be shitty console port and generally shit; and the code is fucking terrible and won't run smooth regardless.

6GB of ram is not as uncommon as you might think,
Generally with what iv seen, the 6GB combo generally comes in triple channel and was very popular on the old 1366 chipsets which can still pack a mighty grunt these days!
as my i7 920 @ 4.0GHz with 24GB of ram will prove that, not the best but plenty of power to keep up with the big boys
The most common standard is dual channel which you will see in most and with the socket 2011 boards you will see quad channel!

That's weird you guys, my i7 870 has been going strong for years. I got 60+fps on BF3 Ultra and I frequently get 45-60fps on Ultra BF4. Which GPU vendor do you both go with? My CPU generally only messes up on CPU intensive encoding, but rarely ever decoding. Note: I have disabled hyperthreading on my CPU because it has terrible support for this range.

Everything is good for recommended, except I have a i7-3770 @3.4 GHz not a 3.5GHz
lol

On Ubisoft, - from the AC games, FC3 etc. They aren't great at optimizing for PC.

One would hope that us in the master race get something closer to those videos released a year or more back. PC is dumbed down. But yeah Ubi make good looking games, but I think rely on brut PC force, over optimisation.

I'm not too worried about the 'eight core recommended' part, I think it's just Ubisoft showing off that they finally have a game that will use more than four cores. I'd be interested to see the performance different on an i7 with and without hyperthreading.

You really didn't like Black Flag? I think I got a lot more hours of fun out of the latter than the former. Reviews are in FC3 favour but not by a lot..
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/far-cry-3
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/assassins-creed-iv-black-flag